Local news outlets are reporting that Meyer Burger has laid off employees at its solar panel assembly facility in Goodyear, Arizona. Worker adjustment and retraining notification (WARN) notices in the state have the number of employees affected within the range of 70 to 355. Meyer Burger confirmed on Wednesday that the plant was shut down “due to a lack of funds.” The company laid off 282 employees.
The Goodyear site
Switzerland-based Meyer Burger opened the Arizona solar panel factory in June 2024. The road to opening the site has been long — the company first announced its plans for a 1.5-GW facility in 2021 and intended to begin operations in 2022. Various financial roadblocks pushed its opening back, but manufacturing incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act helped get the site past the finish line.
Meyer Burger started in the solar industry as a manufacturing equipment developer for heterojunction technology (HJT) solar panel designs. Its “SmartWire” designs were licensed by other manufacturing names, including REC. In 2020, the company ventured into direct solar cell and panel manufacturing and sales, first opening production facilities in Germany before looking at the U.S. market.
As the solar manufacturing market waned in Europe, Meyer Burger placed more of its focus on the United States. The company leased a former Intel lab in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2023 where it intended to start solar cell manufacturing to supply its Arizona assembly plant. Plans were scrapped for the U.S. cell plant last year, after Meyer Burger found it “no longer financially viable.”
Inside Meyer Burger’s facility in Germany
The company closed its German solar panel assembly facility last year as well, but its German cell factory was allegedly still in production this month, along with the Arizona module facility.
Meyer Burger is the only HJT solar panel manufacturer in the United States. The combo of crystalline silicon and amorphous silicon thin-film is a unique manufacturing process that is a few steps more complicated than the industry standard of PERC and TOPCon silicon development. This differentiator was supposed to give Meyer Burger a leg up on the n-type/TOPCon patent battles moving through the industry.
Story updated 05/29 with news of the entire plant being shuttered.
This is a shame, first HJT panel manufacturer seems to be Sanyo some 25 years ago, first small footprint bifacial solar PV panel, then China and really cheap panels pushed Sanyo out of the market. Panasonic bought out the Sanyo IP and continued on until recently and it too boughed out of direct HJT panel manufacturing. It seems China has also gotten to the point of “well made” HJT solar PV panel offerings to the World. U.S. is having problems competing with China as China has spent say the last 40 years developing World wide raw materials supply chains, in China raw to refined materials foundries and factories that feed the supply chains for all of these “assembled in………” manufacturing plants(sic) World wide.
Meyer Burger is using the RIF as the first tranche of “trying to save?” the U.S. manufacturing facility, yet, I find the assertion that the cost of ramping up a silicon foundry is “not cost effective” is suspecious at this time. SO, where does this leave the likes of Heliene, tariffs with Canada and expansion in the U.S. with manufacturing and solar PV boule and wafer facilities being developed?
It is way past time for the U.S. to step up with superior silicon foundry technologies, boule pulling facilities and the substantial energy required to cut wafers, anneal, dope to create high quality solar PV cells to assemble into panels here in the U.S.. This can also become feedstocks for IC chip manufacturing here in the U.S. also. The electronics physicist question to ask is how small a transistor/diode node does one need to effectively use current and future IC chip lithography technologies to formulate a large solar PV cell footprint that can have “rectennas” and tunneling diodes that are photon self biasing to allow extermely wide band light capture from low infrared to high ultraviolet in one solar PV cell? This is the thing, back in the 1990’s research was done in Colorado on “rectennas” and was proven to be possible, yet the diode bias problem could not be solved at that time. Using IC chip fabrication technology of 30 years ago, it was possible to form micro/nano/femto antennas on silicon, the problem was rectifying the light frequencies to D.C. needs self biasing tunnelling diodes for antenna to D.C. rectification as wide bandwidth light capture. This would allow a solar PV cell with a “bell curve” that could use far infrared emissions at night and infrared to high ultraviolet spectrum during the day. Specific efficiency in each mode far infrared to high ultraviolet could be tuned on the solar PV cell for broad spectrum capture and efficiency.